The audience has begun to actually form. My stories are being read and evaluated as a good thing. It could really take off if only I had the power to fan the flames of reading and liking the kind of stories I create. But so many things threaten to literally break my legs. Tornado season is here, and our house is so poorly defended that the insurance company threatens to take away the expensive coverage we have been paying for. Mango-flavored Hitler is creating a tsunami of economic waves of crash and failure. My worldly wealth may be taken away to feather the nests of all the Trump-approved grifter birds. Banko Merricka no longer has my accounts, but they have a reputation for re-collecting already-paid debts.
If I can continue filmmaking in the theater of my imagination, I should produce a few more books. The one that is now done and edited twice is Cissy Moonskipper Meets the Nebulons. It is the second book in the Cissy Moonskipper’s Travels series of science fiction novellas. Cissy meets the blue-skinned race that produced Suki Vorranac (pictured above), Cissy’s pilot, rescued from pirates in the first book. All that is left to accomplish is the publication step.
I also have half a manuscript of the above novel created already. The Haunted Toy Store is a break from my usual interconnected stories. It tells of people’s weird encounters with a decrepit old toy store that never seems to sell any of its antique toys. It turns out that the toys they do sell are the customers they lure in, bought by a customer base of dead people who need to play with human souls to try to solve their ghost problems.
I also have this book well underway as a manuscript that’s about one-fourth of the way through a longer-than-usual story that weaves together the loose ends of several previous Hometown Novels. He Rose on a Golden Wing is a story originally titled Valerie in Darkness. It is about teenagers working as a group to overcome their collective traumas.
If I can do it, I will publish these books before I die. The show must go on… if possible. Don’t wish me a broken leg because that may well happen.
Of course, authors create characters. Even autobiographers create characters. Carl Sandburg could no more make his words into Lincoln than a bird can make its tweets into a cat. Sandburg can, however, help us to understand Lincoln as Carl Sandburg understands the words that are Lincoln.
I, too, have not lived a particularly happy life. But I was always the “teacher with a sense of humor” in the classroom, and students loved me for it. Funny people are often not happy people. But they make themselves out of funny words because laughter heals pain, and jokes are effective medicine. And so I choose to write comedy novels. Novels that are funny even though they are about hard things like freezing to death, losing loved ones, being humiliated, being molested, and fear of death. Magical purple words can bring light to any darkness. I am the words I choose to write in my own story. The words not only reveal me, they make me who I am. And it is up to me to write those words. Other people might wish to do it for me. But they really can’t. The words are for me alone to write.
And so it is imperative that I write my words in the form of my novels, my essays, and this goofy blog post. I am writing myself to life, even if no one ever reads my writing.
Lynn Johnston’s For Better or Worse is also an old friend. I used to read it in the newspaper practically every day. I watched those kids grow up and have adventures almost as if they were members of my own family. So the mashed potatoes part of the meal is easy to digest too.
Catch a Falling Star 